The synopsis of the book “Beria, the Class Surge. 1899–1939” by Vladimir Shirogorov
In the foreground from the left to right, – Lavrentiy Beria, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrey Andreyev, Vyacheslav Molotov, Mikhail Kalinin, Kliment Voroshilov, Josef Stalin, Lazar Kaganovich, Nickolay Ezhov, Andrey Zhdanov. They are hearing the speech of the Azerbaijani leader Mir-Jafar Baghirov on the First Session of the USSR’s Supreme Soviet, the evening meeting on 18 January 1938, in front of Azerbaijan’s delegation.
It was the inception event of the critical coup to change Nickolay Ezhov as the People’s Commissar of the Internal Affairs to Lavrentiy Beria and shift him as the Organizational and Personnel Secretary of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, VKP(b), with Georgy Malenkov. Beria, Andreyev, Zhdanov and Baghirov were the ringleaders; Kaganovich and Malenkov were their key associates; Stalin and Molotov enforced the coup; Kalinin and Voroshilov turned its opportunistic supporters. The success of the plot terminated the Great Terror of 1936–1938.
A few months of the coup’s build-up, its execution and aftermath became the destiny pass of the Soviet socialism, labours of the Soviet political system, range of the class confrontation and pattern action of the emerging socialist classes.
Beria is the crown prince of the Soviet epoch for its admirers and the devil for its foes.
One’s view of Lavrentiy Beria is determined by one’s perception of the USSR.
Both scholars and dilettantes who turn to the case of Beria, – which is huge, deep and diverse in the now-a-day public opinion, – find plenty of intimate, private and individual content in his person.
Nevertheless, first of all, Beria is the political and social phenomenon, the essence of Soviet socialism.
The USSR was the prime historical factor of the 20th century. And it was one of the few grand polities that were created not by a play of events but by theory.
The USSR was the product of the elaborated thinking on human history and its way from the past through the present to the future.
Marxism is this thinking
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A synopsis of the book
Beria in the Marxist historiosophy
Despite the sunset of the 20th century “socialist” civilization that followed the Marxian practical paradigm, intellectual Marxism is steadily spreading due to its capability to permeate and mutate. It extends to the status of the most all-embracing and influential worldview on human history. It is arguable that its instruments are omnipotent and everywhere efficient. Nevertheless, Marxist analytical tools both disclose the deep current of history and surface its driving captains and event-makers. Beria is prominent among them. And Marxism proposes the set of links to chain the captains of history to its deep current.
Marxism establishes the solid gearwheel of interaction between the two levels of history, between its fundamental and eventual factors. The gearwheel is the struggle of classes. It makes out the social motives of the figures in political events. It also grasps their intimate features as the important drivers that other observations find irrelevant to grand history. By the Marxian concept of the class struggle, a researcher is enabled to comprehend Beria, his every action and each passion.
Beria was one of the principal creators of Soviet socialism, and he was a practitioner of Marxism. He was Marxism’s disciple since the practice of Marxism is the implementation of its maxima of the class struggle. Marxism is the best tool to study Beria as the Marxist executive in the state-society created by the Marxian followers according to Marxism. Marxism does not exclude other fashions of thinking, however, the ancient philosophical requirement “like is known by like” and Marxism’s theoretical perfection call it up to the study of the USSR. Even researching Beria’s private nature, his sometimes egotist, licentious, violent, irrational and sometimes self-sacrificing and objective-determined behaviour it is necessary to remember that his personality was tamed by the 20th century, the epoch of the Marxian-style class struggle.
The concept of the class struggle was too engaged in politics and propaganda from the middle of the 19th to the end of the 20th century. The Marxist historical studies did not produce many biographical masterpieces of the genre. Nevertheless, a few that appeared became a revelation. Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon of 1852 and Eugeniy Tarle’s Napoleon of 1936 demonstrate the Marxist biographical technique as a perfect research instrument. Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution of 1930 and Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks of 1929 – 1935 expose the entire matrix of the epoch by following individual life. The Marxian biographical technique combines the study of the epoch and research on a figure’s nature and close events. The combination effectively reveals the historical location of the particular human being.
Beria in the sources and method of historical study
In more than thirty years of the post-mortem studies on the USSR after its collapse, the picture of Soviet socialism lost any integrity. It is deprived of the rigid order imposed by the Communist Party’s bosses, the shortcoming of the Soviet scholars. And it lacks the harsh Western Cold War anti-communist imperatives, Sovietology’s drawback. Today the Soviet studies are like a medusa on a beach – shapeless, jelly, dying. Soviet history fell apart to occasional accidents and ambitions of prominent figures; Beria is admitted as one of the latter. Nevertheless, nothing in Soviet history happened by chance. Its seeming eventual chaos and voluntarism were bridled by the universal master.
Beria acted among other actors, and nobody of them was free from the social forces that determined Soviet history. A great deal depended on the actor’s understanding of them and one’s choice of affiliation. The actors who hesitated to make the choice were dragged to serve one of the social forces anyway. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Josef Stalin, the uppermost magnates of early Soviet history, took their respective sides in full conscience. Grigoriy Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolay Bukharin, and Aleksey Rykov, its barons, were appropriated by the social groups despite their will and paid their lives for the groups’ factional ambitions.
Beria was one of the Soviet leaders of the new “post-revolutionary” generation who made choices early in their careers with open eyes and determination. His fast affiliation with the advancing social group and recognition of its specific needs became the driver of his professional and political rise. He devoted his natural gifts to the social group of his choice. The commitment coloured his actions including those that look disgusting now-a-day. And the commitment was responsible for his demise two decades after the last events that are examined in the current research had been unfolding. The principal objective of the current research is to disclose the social forces that dominated Beria’s life, track their genesis and development in parallel with his career; and detect the antagonistic social force that turned out his Nemesis.
Beria moved right into the whirl-centre of Soviet history in the 1920s – 1930s by the will of Providence and his incessant efforts. His biography shows Soviet history in a different way from the patterns of the current academic historiography and mass media paperwork. They both refuse the social research technique that historical sociology applies to other countries and epochs with great efficiency. Besides the Marxian paradigm, the 20th century brought up the analytical models of Max Weber, Michael Mann, Walter Runciman, and Charles Tilly, among others. One of them is necessary for a politician’s biographical study. And the social research technique is the method to integrate the advanced research approaches, comparative analysis, prosopography, “history of everyday life,” and intellectual and institutional history.
Undoubtedly, different epochs require various research paradigms. The Weberian attention to the social elites as the autonomous socio-political entity suites the study of the states-building and emergence of nations in the Early Modern Time. Michael Mann’s scheme of the overlapping social domains of ideological, economic, military, and political power looks attractive for analysis of the now-a-day events and processes. Walter Runciman’s observation of the societies’ contest and survival applies to the periods of sharp transformation. The Marxist doctrine of the immediate command of the class struggle over politics and human behaviour is the method for the study of the first half of the 20th century, the epoch of the distinctive classes with their separate self-consciousness. It was the epoch of Beria’s life.
Without the social technique, historians lose their ground for the critical assessment and integration of sources. They are unable to extract the information that the sources keep up. Historians reduce themselves to slavery to “documentary raw materials.” The barely swim in the muddy gush of the archival papers and eyewitness evidence of the Soviet epoch. The available “documentary raw materials” of the Soviet epoch are distributed unevenly between historical “areas” and fields of research, and those that are in use differ in their sort and quality. Beria’s life is an exemplary field where the historians sometimes sink in the flood of data and sometimes thirst without a droplet of a fact. And they fill lacunas with pure fiction.
It is futile to expect that some new documents will close the gaps. Many archives perished in the upheavals of the 20th century or were destroyed by their masters. Those that survived, due to the specific of Beria’s professional activity in the secret areas, won’t be ever accessible. Many documents are forbidden or destroyed forever. Large parts of Beria’s life wouldn’t be ever exposed. Finally, the archive papers are not a narrative for immediate reading. They propose reality in a distorted and fragmented way. Recognizing them as the “truth” is a hard mistake. The historians of the faraway past overcame it long ago but the historians of the USSR repeat it again and once again. One of the calls of the current study is to process the available documents and converge them into the biography of one man by the social research technique.
Beria in the concepts of the USSR’s history
Two concepts seize dominance over the studies of the first Soviet decades. They are the concept of the increasing authoritarian power of Josef Stalin and one of a deep-rooted license of the local communist bosses. The scholars look at the position of Beria variably here or there. The first concept, or the “tyranny” approach, is produced by the processing of the Soviet communist party’s minutes, reports of the Soviet economic departments, and files of the secret police. The concept’s footage looks like the struggle between the “hardline” and “liberal” Bolshevik factions. Following a “hardliner” Stalin’s scrapping of his political rivals since the middle of the 1920s, the struggle outputs his dictatorship by the middle of the 1930s. Approximately from that period, Soviet history was determined, by the choice of a scholar, either by Stalin’s genius or his paranoia. In this frame of thinking, Beria was an effective weapon of Stalin’s genius or criminal retainer of his paranoia. Being held in Stalin’s fist, Beria was allowed to play a minor game according to his nature, vicious or heroic, on a scholar’s preference.
The second concept, or the “feudal” approach, declares that Stalin was a “weak dictator;” while the regional and departmental bosses were the real masters of Soviet everyday life. Their power ambitions were almost unbridled besides the rare moments when the centre attacked them with fierce aggression. The “Great Terror,” or “Great Purge” of the second third of the 1930s became the “total war” among the unrestricted regional and departmental bosses and their clash with the aggressive centre. The bosses had mutilated each other and then the centre smashed them. The personal tyranny of Stalin became the outcome of the trouble, similarly to his ascendence according to the first concept. The adepts of the second concept view Beria as one of the Soviet regional and departmental satraps who were smart enough to feel the changing environment and skillfully submit their ambitions to Stalin’s will. Stalin enjoyed Beria’s subservience and recruited him for dirty functions that he liked avoiding. The highest political positions and license for multiple evils of his nature became Beria’s prize in this bargain.
In the two thousand years old “Iliad” of antique Homer, the protagonists’ actions were determined, besides their wills and vices, by the hegemonic play of Olympic Gods. In both dominant concepts of the USSR’s history, the Gods are absent. There are the Stalinist swing between the paranoid terror and administrative rationality, the servility of his accomplices, like Beria, and the misery of their victims. Or there is Stalin’s wisdom to break down the self-minded Bolshevik bosses and construct the backbone of the efficient communist bureaucracy. Herein and therein Beria is Stalin’s agent, exercising the destiny determined by the Leader.
Beria and politics in the early USSR
Both basic concepts of politics in the USSR are oppressed by the figure of Stalin. They do not discern other springboards of the Bolshevik decision-making besides his will and do not allow other actors. Meanwhile, Beria’s biography makes out them. From the very beginning of his political life in the Baku and Tiflis Bolshevik underground of 1919 – 1920, and in the middle ranks of the Soviet political police ChK, Emergency Commission against counter-revolution, in the first half of the 1920s, the Bolshevik institutions were internally divided among cohesive clans. The power clan is not an accidental group of people around some boss, it is the unit of recognizable origin, typical for the epoch and country, with an established structure and predictable life cycle.
The Bolshevik clans were shaped according to their affiliation in the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik underground. The affiliation was tied inside the territorial units of the illegal Bolshevik party, and jail and exile communities. It was requisite for political and physical survival. The Bolshevik underground and prison groups developed the inner discipline and pattern of integration into the whole body of the party as autonomous units. It was the subterfuge, political-criminal and militant cohesion under severe strain. The Bolshevik underground units settled as the distinctive power groups when they took over the regional and departmental authority after the Bolshevik revolution and during the following Civil War. The clans strengthened in the competitive economic surrounding during the NEP (New Economic Policy), a quasi-market period from 1921 to 1929. They learned to exploit their administrative control over the territories and departments, channel the central resources, and use extortion and corruption for their egotist purposes. The power struggle among them over their political positions was the prime allocation of their efforts.
The clans masked their true objectives and intentions behind the curtain of unrecognizably-similar ideological declarations. It is impossible to distinguish between them by reading the Bolshevik party reports that the archives of the epoch contain. It is the reason why the scholarly history of the USSR that is written mostly on this documentary foundation is more a study on the archives than a political study. And the mass-media excursion into the USSR’s history that is fed by the stance of its leading figures, which is extracted from their speeches and writings, is an anthology of fables.
The main political conflict in the early USSR consisted of not the onslaught of Stalin’s ideological hardness and pounding of his ideological opponents to establish himself as the dictator. The early Soviet decades were packed with the power struggle of the Bolshevik clans. The clans were never only territorial or departmental, they were incorporated by a personal liaison of their members. It is the reason why they are hardly detectable by the research on bureaucratical institutions. Beria was a recruit of the “Transcaucasian” clan with its leaders, positioned on the top of the Bolshevik party and its Transcaucasian branch, such as Jozef “Stalin” Dzhugashvili, Sergey “Kirov” Kostrikov, Grigoriy “Sergo” Ordzhonikidze, Aleksander “Martuni” Myasnikyan. Beria’s biography reveals the outer shape and inner arrangement of the Transcaucasian clan, the ties and hierarchy of its members, and its lineage to the pre-revolutionary underground network of the local socialists.
Two of the branches of the Transcaucasian Bolshevik clan became decisive for Beria’s career, – the Baku branch presided by Kirov, Levon Mirzoyan and Aliheydar Karaev; and the Tiflis branch presided by Ordzhonikidze, Mamia Orakhelashvili and Amayak Nazaretyan. The first steps of Beria’s career disclose a way of adopting a lower rank socialist follower to one of the underground units and assigning him to special tasks. His relocation to open activity after the seizure of the political power and further promotion open the rules of the Bolshevik clan career. Beria’s career climb, if tracked stair after stair, is an example of how the Bolshevik protection functioned and what were the requirements for an apprentice. Beria’s rise was synchronous with the development of the political position of the Transcaucasian clan in the Bolshevik power struggle. It exposes the specific needs of the clan for control over the region and inter-clan competition over the political primacy in the USSR.
The “Turkestanian” or “Trade Union” clan became the main opponent of the Transcaucasian clan in the 1920s and first half of the 1930s. Beria’s biography demonstrates its structure and composition. Many figures who are invariably included in Stalin’s inner circle by historians, – Lazar Kaganovich and Andrey Andreyev among them, – are found to be members of the Turkestanian Bolshevik clan. Until the destruction of the Turkestanian clan, they acted not according to Stalin’s wishes but after the collective interests of their clan and orders of its leader, Valerian Kuybyshev, who is mostly disregarded as an obscure figure of Bolshevik politics. Through the cooperation and conflict of the Transcaucasian and Turkestanian Bolshevik clans, Kuybyshev’s and his entourage’s influence on Beria’s career was tremendous.
In the Soviet power politics, where the clans clashed, Beria appeared as a fighter whom the Transcaucasians promoted for his rush and efficiency. And the Turkestanians promoted the figures that would become Beria’s competitors and collaborators for decades, – Andrey Zhdanov, Nikolay Shvernik, Nikolay Ezhov. Beria’s career demonstrates that not the illusive ideological disputes which historians like emphasizing but the realities of the clan power-politics determined the destiny choices at the crossroads of Soviet history.
Beria’s biography transforms the politics in the early USSR from the linear “hardening of Stalin’s dictatorship” into the heterogenous interaction of the rival Bolshevik clans. Stalin and the Transcaucasians did not get the upper hand always and automatically, as it is presumed by historians and popular opinion. A lot of the very important decisions that shaped Soviet socialism and defined its social, economic, ideological, administrative, and cultural content, and that are ascribed to Stalin and his gang invariably, were actually invented, initiated and pressed ahead by Kuybyshev and the Turkestanians. Among them, there are the fundamental combination of compulsory collective farming, collectivization; destruction of the rich peasant strata, “kulaks;” breakneck industrialization; and elimination of the market economy. Kuybyshev initiated all of the four big breaks of the “Grand [socialist] Breakthrough” of the turn of the 1920s – 1930s, which are routinely considered being authored and executed by Stalin. Beria was not a first-rate figure among the Transcaucasians. It was his rise in the clan power-politics that lifted him into the personal entourage of Stalin, who was the uppermost leader of the Transcaucasian clan and its man in the Bolshevik party’s top leadership.
Beria’s destiny soared in 1927 – 1928 when Stalin was defeated by Kuybyshev in the power struggle over the unfolding or suppressing of the NEP. In that period Stalin conjoined with the figures in the Bolshevik leadership who represented in Soviet politics the capitalist rich peasantry and urban businessmen, the “right” Bolsheviks, – Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov. The trio of Stalin, Bukharin, and Rykov insisted to dismantle the last restrictions on the free capitalist development of agriculture and private industry, the bans on the free hire of labour and the rent of lands. Kuybyshev skillfully mobilized the support of the heads of the regional Bolshevik clans, former underground fighters, that were much lesser liberals than the egghead former emigrant intelligentsia of the party’s Moscow headquarter. Kuybyshev overthrew Bukharin and Rykov and compelled Stalin to make the complete volte-face. First, Kuybyshev achieved the majority support for his plan of forced industrialization and cancellation of the market economy. Then he threw the Bolsheviks into the abyss of the collectivization and destruction of “kulaks.” Both of the decisions became the turning points for Soviet socialism of the “no-return” significance.
The heavy crisis of the Transcaucasian clan resulted in this Stalin’s defeat in the power struggle over the prime political imperatives. The Transcaucasians lost not only some positions of prime prominence on the all-USSR top, but they also had to surrender some important positions in their home region, Transcaucasia. Beria was promoted together with the group of the clan pupils who were called up to refresh the manpower of the Transcaucasian clan and recharge its ambitions. He was not in the first row of the clan. It was composed of such figures as Kirov, Orakhelashvili and Mirzoyan, but he was not a rank-and-file anymore. In December of 1926, he was promoted to the chief of the Georgian directorate of the Soviet political police, which changed its name from ChK to GPU. And five years later, after the downfall of Orakhelashvili and Mirzoyan, Beria received Stalin’s push and the blessing of Kuybyshev to ascend to the office of the Bolshevik boss of the Transcaucasia.
Beria, making the career
Beria started his career as a low-rank Bolshevik underground operative and party office clerk, however, as soon as he had achieved his first minor promotion, he began to recruit to his nucleus private clan. He was building up it in the Azeri ChK and Georgian ChK where he gained the position to manage the secret operations against the political enemies of the Bolsheviks, first of all, the non-Bolshevik socialists and different kinds of nationalists. During the years of the NEP, the morale and discipline of the ChK personnel were low and the efficiency of its operations depended exclusively on the personal communication among the operatives and between them and their superiors. Beria grabbed it early and composed his retinue of his fellows in the Baku and Tiflis underground and especially of his cell-mates in the jails of the Menshevik (social-democratic) Georgian government. In the middle of 1920 Beria was imprisoned twice following the Georgian raiding of the Bolshevik Tiflis underground whereto he was assigned by the Azeri ChK and 11th Red Army’s reconnaissance department.
If Beria had vacated his positions in the ChK after being promoted further upward, they were taken over by his mates of the underground and jails. When the base of the pyramid of the clan’s hierarchy became too large to be filled with them, Beria recruited a “fresh blood” of the ChK operatives and Bolshevik activists, scrupulously picked up by the criteria of their service performance and personal fidelity. Beria was an effective and dedicated agent of the Bolshevik Transcaucasian clan while he led his nucleus clan of the ChK operatives and party clerks. They were bound by their common mentality, combining the Bolshevik class-struggle ideology and belief in the omnipotence of political violence. They were allies advancing to the objective of upper positions which meant more power and more resources at their disposal. The similarity of Beria’s private nucleus clan to the political clans in the foundation of the Bolshevik party-state is striking. His private clan in the secret police became the leverage of Beria’s career equally effective with the patronage of his superiors in the Transcaucasian political clan most of whom had been his controllers in the underground.
The research on the early stage of Beria’s career discloses abundant evidence of the clan foundation of the Bolshevik party-state. Besides Beria’s nucleus clan in the Transcaucasian ChK, other clans coagulated inside the Bolshevik power structure as well. They were shadow agents behind the official institutions and they were real decision-makers and executives of the Bolshevik power. Sometimes the clans were allies but mostly they were rivals. The rivalry of the clans became the intrinsic rule of the Bolshevik power politics. Sometimes the super-clans, like the Transcaucasian clan, were able to herd and bind together minor territorial and administrative clans for grandiose political undertakings like the overthrowal of the NEP at the end of the 1920s while often they ran separately each to their objectives. Until Beria achieved prominence in the Transcaucasian clan, he was preoccupied with the second agenda much more than the first. The struggle between the minor Bolshevik clans over supremacy is a critically under-researched field, its obscurity is the reason for most scholars neglecting the clan foundation of the early Bolshevik party-state.
At the end of the 1920s, Beria’s “aborigine” ChK clan of the native Transcaucasian recruits clashed with the opposite “alien” ChK clan of the centrally-delegated stuffers. The key positions in the Transcaucasian ChK were the personal stake in the clash. The style of the operations against the Bolsheviks’ political opponents, who rallied in the harshness and deprivation of the Grand Breakthrough, was its political stake. Beria achieved the stunning victory. He grasped prominence for his accomplices and ideas. However, the man-debris of the opposite clan, who had been exiled from Transcaucasia, joined the rising “North-Caucasian” secret police clan presided by Yefim Yevdokimov. Yevdokimov eclipsed all other Beria’s opponents in the all-USSR secret police. Beria’s fierce personal rivalry with him and the “war” of Beria’s clan against Evdokimov’s clan would settle down only with the elimination of one of the contenders and most of the loser’s retinue in the bloody Great Terror in 1936 – 1939.
Beria, double agent
Beria moved into Soviet politics from the secret police, ChK – GPU, he committed to this particular organization roundly the first ten years of his Bolshevik career. The ChK – GPU became Beria’s university; he was brought up as a politician, manager and character in the ChK – GPU. It is impossible to lay down Beria’s biography without close research on his ChK – GPU activity. It was the ChK – GPU where Beria obtained the “philosophers’ stone” of his career. He learned to turn out his professional activity in the ChK – GPU into his private political power. In the ChK – GPU he first tried the taste of the power and trained to use it.
At the end of 1919 the leaders of the Baku Bolshevik underground, Mirzoyan, Victor Naneyshvili and Vissarion “Beso” Lominadze assigned Beria to the intelligence and counterintelligence bodies of the illegal Baku committee, Bakcom, of the Russian Communist Party, RCP, managed respectively by Epifan Kvantaliani and Georgiy Kavtaradze. The legal twin of the Bakcom, the Turkic socialist party of the Transcaucasia, Hummet, participated in the coalition with two other nationalist Muslim parties, Musavat and Ittihad, that governed over the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, ADR, one of the ethnic states created in Transcaucasia after the collapse of the Russian Empire. The Bakcom inserted Beria into ARD’s secret police applying the political connections in the ARD’s establishment of Bakcom’s Hummet associates, Karaev and Mirza Davud Huseynov.
Being the double agent in the ADR’s secret police, Beria assisted the Bolshevik agents to infiltrate the oil fields’ labour movement and smuggle the tremendous volume of crude oil, lubricants and petrol to hungry Soviet Russia’s industry and Red Army. The latter venture was under the immediate control of the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, and his commissar over Transcaucasia and oil, Stalin. Beria took an active part in the Bolshevik uprisal in April of 1920, together with the guerrilla group under a Kurdish aristocrat Ildrym Sultanov, who had been Beria’s handler in the oil-smuggling business. The ADR was destroyed and the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, AzSSR, was established instead of it. Beria distinguished himself as an effective young underground operative and was rewarded with the protection of the underground’s leaders who became the rulers of the AzSSR.
After the merger of Azerbaijan, the Bolsheviks turned against their socialist rivals, the Georgian social-democrat Mensheviks who governed over the Republic of Georgia. Beria, a native of the major Georgian ethnos, Mingrelians, was assigned to the Azeri ChK intelligence and the 11th Red Army reconnaissance department, both reporting to the prominent ChK counter-sabotage operative Vasily Pankratov. Beria was sent to Georgia to assist the Bolshevik underground and prepare the coup and invasion over there. In the short gap between his Baku underground and Tiflis clandestine missions, Beria was briefed on the intelligence gathering and analysis, informers’ recruiting and manipulation, trained in hiding in the alien environment and handling of the small arms. He became obsessed with these crafts all his life. Beria’s instructors, Abram “Taras” Eingorn, Anatoly Rutkovsky, and Georgiy Kavtaradze, were of the insurgency, ChK and military background. They had a mutual affection for their pupil; Beria continued to interact with them for decades. First, the underground experience, and then the intelligence training and missions heavily influenced Beria’s mentality, and his views on people, life and politics. Beria’s risky missions to Georgia strengthened his reputation as an effective, smart and lucky operative. And Beria got the patronage of Kirov who directed the Bolshevik diplomacy and sabotage in Georgia. Soon Kirov became one of the Transcaucasians’ leaders, the AzSSR’s ruler and Stalin’s intimate friend. Among Beria’s other connections, Kirov’s patronage favoured his beneficial starting position in the Azeri ChK.
Beria’s double agent activity in the Baku Bolshevik underground and his exposure during the intelligence missions to Georgia supplied the facts to suspect him in the earnest cooperation with the ADR’s secret police and British secret service SIS which supervised it since the British occupation of Baku in October 1918 – August 1919. Both accusations were born in the brief aftermath of Beria’s Georgian missions, in September of 1920, when he got a minor office in the Baku Bolshevik apparatus. The legend of Beria’s counter-revolutionary treason was born in the struggle of the AzSSR’s native rulers, former leaders of Bakcom underground and Hummet, and the appointees from the RCP’s Moscow headquarters who arrived to take over the oil-rich and strategically important Azerbaijan in the early autumn of 1920. The legend was not true, and it was not untrue as well. The specific of Beria’s activities as an intermediary agent between the Bolsheviks, ADR’s and Georgian officials and, highly probable, the British SIS station in the Transcaucasia, produced an abundance of facts and hints to blame him.
Ascending in the Bolshevik hierarchy, Beria accrued more numerous and mightier enemies, and his turncoat legend accrued brighter details. The true evidence of it is still unrevealed, probably lost forever, however, it is possible to reconstruct the kind of documents and witnesses that it contained. Beria would drag the stone of the accusations chained to his leg all his further life. In his first inner-Bolshevik quarrel Beria was pushed to the wrong side. Only the protection of Kirov, who mastered to subjugate the locals’ ambitions and clear away the cruel Moscow intruders, saved Beria’s life and career. Beria emerged from this misadventure with dizzy prospects. It was right the moment when, after the scrutiny and denial of his alleged misdoings by the ChK’ and the party’s inspections, he entered the Bolshevik sanctuary of the secret police, ChK.
Beria, political terror and special operations
Beria was appointed to the secret operational department of the Azeri ChK in February of 1921. The control over the Baku oil industry, that had the unrivalled importance for the whole Soviet economy and international positions, became Beria’s first commitment. Supervising the oil industry Beria obtained associations among the top Bolshevik political figures and top officers of the Transcaucasian ChK and all-USSR OGPU. He also obtained investigative skills and the recognition of his opponents in the Bolshevik power grid. This vision determined his objectives up to the end of the 1920s. The cooperation with the Bolshevik oil mogul of Baku, Aleksander Serebrovsky, became Beria’s school where he learned the basic management principles that he applied later in the offices of the Transcaucasian and Georgian rulers, head of the important war-industry departments during WWII and nuclear bomb engineering at its aftermath.
After Beria’s move from the Azeri to Georgian ChK in November of 1922, it was his oil commitment that promoted him to the all-Transcaucasian OGPU with the responsibility to supervise his Azeri ChK successors. Beria’s achievements in crushing the Azeri nationalistic underground and semi-legal units of the Socialist-Revolutionary party became the next consideration of his Bolshevik and secret police superiors to promote him. Both challenges were most urgent for the Soviet Georgian leaders due to the bottleneck importance of the Batum oil port in their responsibility for the Soviet oil export, and the rebellious underground activity of the expelled Georgian Mensheviks. The Georgian boss Orakhelashvili, a well-established figure in the Bolshevik community and Lenin’s mate, and Transcaucasian GPU chief Semen Mogilevsky, one of the best operatives of all-USSR OGPU, close to its founder and chief Felix Dzerzhinsky, became Beria’s next patrons and teachers.
Beria’s oil and counterinsurgency commitments drove him into the huge domestic political crisis in the Bolshevik party and USSR in 1924. The crisis determined the outcome of the ideological struggle between different Bolshevik factions over the most important points of the political agenda – the liberalization of the economy by the NEP; the weight of the Moscow centre and national periphery in the construction of the USSR; and prospects of the military aggression to rally the All-World Revolution against the Entente imperialism.
The rivalry over the redistribution of the positions inside the Bolshevik establishment following Linin’s demise was the power component of the crisis. It had its specific episodes in the Transcaucasia. They were the Georgian uprisal of 1924, which was directed by the Paris-based Georgian government in exile; the subversive activity of the Musavat’s and Ittihad’s underground in Azerbaijan; and sabotage of the Baku oil industry by the jealous Dutch-British oil magnate Henry Deterding of the Royal Dutch–Shell.
Stalin’s alliance with the USA’s oil magnate John Rockefeller, Deterding’s arch contender, forged by Serebrovsky and networked by Beria’s informers, fractured Deterding’s combination of economic subversion and militant insurrections. The study on the power component and local episodes of the Bolshevik crisis, in which Beria was directly involved, discloses the true groups and alliances in the Bolshevik leadership instead of the artificial ideological clusters proposed by the historians who base their research on the uncritical acceptance of the party discussions. Beria managed his part of the power game, assigned to him by the Transcaucasian leaders, – Stalin, Kirov, Orakhelashvili, – and the OGPU’s masters allied to them, – Dzerzhinsky and Moghilevsky, – with a rush, initiative and ruthless efficiency. He masterminded the suppression of the Georgian Menshevik nationalistic revolt and administered the death sentence to its active participants by summary shooting. Beria was rewarded with the highest patronage of the Transcaucasian and OGPU topmen, with the trust, resources and autonomy for the regional and international operations in his mind.
Their planning was laid out by Mogilevsky, who was the head of the all-Soviet OGPU foreign intelligence directorate before his assignment to Transcaucasia and one of the best ChK spy-masters; and Pankratov with his counter-sabotage and counter-insurgence skills. After the perishing of Mogilevsky in the plane crash in March of 1925 and Pankratov’s removal from the OGPU due to his adhesion to the ostracised Red Army founder Leon Trotsky, Beria was charged to head the special operations of the Transcaucasian GPU. They were designed against the regional nationalistic underground and emigration supported and directed by the Entente’s intelligence services and Deterding’s multi-million funds. The emigration centres were located in Istanbul, Berlin, and Paris, in the Iranian and Turkish transborder frontier, with the growing importance of Warsaw and Tokyo as their eager sponsors.
Beria ventured the coordinated special operations in Transcaucasia and abroad moving his accomplices to key managing and operational positions. He appointed to the operations abroad the members of his personal ChK clan, – Georgians David “Datiko” Kiladze, Dmitry “Tite” Lordkipanidze and Vladimir Dekanozov; Russian Peter Zubov; Armenian Semen Pirumov; and Latvian Robert Gulbis. Beria, who was brought up in the oil-Baku internationalistic surrounding, did not become nationalistic in Georgia, the native country of his ancestors. He also was not poisoned by the atmosphere of Transcaucasia with its nationalistic obsession. He moved to the prime positions in the management of his domestic counter-insurgency operations, – Jew Josef Stansky and Latvian Ivan Purnis, patronaged Azeri Mir Jafar Baghirov and Georgian Feofan Edzhibia. The social descent of his associates was not his first preoccupation as well. The former print-house worker Jew Timofey Borshchev and Georgian prince Shalva Tsereteli both were among his protegees. The operational perfection and personal fidelity were much more important. From this list Dekanozov was Beria’s mate in the Baku underground; Kiladze, Lordkipanidze, Zubov, Stansky, Edzhibia, and Tsereteli were Beria’s cellmates in the Georgian prisons. They made up the classic Bolshevik nucleus clan.
The special operations abroad and domestic political terror against the underground nationalists became the school for the excellent Beria’s operatives like Lev Vasilevsky, moles like Georgy Gegelia, and influencers like Levan Agniashvili, investigators like Veniamin Gulst, field commanders like Vissarion Melikadze, Alexey Sadjaya and Yuvelyan Sumbatov-Topuridze. They were Beria’s professional pupils and became the newcomers to his private clan making it one of the most capable GPU units with its particular style of special operations.
Beria and his operatives managed to behead, disorganize and grab control over the Transcaucasian emigration in Europe. They decisively reduced its capabilities in the Turkish and Iranian frontier, disrupted its communication with the underground in the Soviet Transcaucasia and discloses the underground’s knots tracking their connection to the emigration centres. They defeated Deterding’s and the emigrants’ attempt to disorganize the Transcaucasian economy by the influx of counterfeit Soviet currency and ignite the widespread insurrection against the Soviet authorities in Transcaucasia.
The Georgian emigration in France with its “government in exile” that orchestrated the riot-inspiring and sabotage activity in Transcaucasia was especially beaten. Its chief of operations and former interior minister Noy Ramishvily, who had arrested Beria three times in the summer of 1920, was shot dead at the Paris Metro in December of 1930. The mastermind and political handler of the Transcaucasian, Ukrainian and Middle Asian nationalists, and close adviser to the Polish dictator Józef Piłsudski, Tadeusz Ludwik “Kirgiz” Hołówko, was killed in the Сarpathian Truskavets sanatorium in August of 1931. The decay of the radical nationalist emigration closely followed both assassinations. The failures inspired many emigrants to return to the USSR.
With the political support of the USSR’s upper leaders, applying infiltration, bribery, intimidation and honey-traps, Beria brought to terms Deterding and liberated the Soviet oil industry and export from his sabotage. Deterding accepted his lack of operational resources against the alliance of Stalin and Rockefeller. Looking for the most effective leverage against the hated Bolsheviks, the oil magnate switched to sponsoring German Adolf Hitler’s Nazi. And he linked the radical Transcaucasian emigrants to Hitler, the contact that was closely monitored by Beria’s moles.
Carrying out his “clandestine war,” Beria demonstrated his efficiency to combine intelligence and counter-intelligence, pointed special operations and “mass operations” against social groups, assassinations and ideological clean-up. He became one of a few of the GPU’s managers capable to carry out this kind of complicated effort. The success had two sides for him. First, after Beria’s transfer to the Bolshevik party leadership, he became the only expert of this craft among top party officials, a status that much strengthened his position. Second, Beria learned to look at all other fields, – economic, administrative, cultural, – as the objectives of the special operations with their ruthless means. It brought success to his ventures but often they were extremely ugly and costly.
Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders considered that party politics consists of organizational, personnel, and ideological efforts. From Beria’s point of view, it was the area of the recruiting of informants, handling of agents, data-gathering, enforcing and pointed strikes. Beria’s pattern suits better to fight in the mess of unpredictable events. But Stalin-style approach was superior in the long run where the link of the political decisions with the ideology and social trend was decisive. It is the reason why Beria, after ascending to the political top in 1938, remained almost unseen on it up to the beginning of WWII. The master of the terror and intelligence special operations, he remained a political apprentice.
Beria, classes and nations
Beria climbed into the office of the Transcaucasian GPU’s chief right at the moment when the nature of the political struggle in the USSR changed dramatically and irreversibly. All of a sudden it appeared that the Bolshevik clans did not hang in thin air, they were not self-sufficient and irresponsible. It appeared that the broad social groups pressed them from underneath, – social classes and ethnic nations. Transcaucasia became the first USSR region where this pressure emerged actual and became visible.
The Baku oil industry was the objective of the focused Soviet investments in the second half of the 1920s. It was a field where the Soviet model of the state-sponsored fast growth of the technologically advanced industrial cluster was introduced with great success. The experiment was resumed when the Baku model was implemented for the all-USSR industrialization in the 1930s. The only substantial difference between the “Five Years Plan” from the Baku experiment consisted of the fact that the latter was carried out in the market environment of the NEP and was export-oriented, and the former became the NEP’s demise and had the domestic priorities.
Besides the stunning results of the oil-pumping and refinery growth, the Baku experiment had its social and national consequences. The new strata of industrial workers emerged in the oil fields and oil-refinery facilities with the adjacent oil machinery, chemical factories, production of construction materials and engineering. The freshers were substantially different from the old industrial proletariat, the social base of the pre-Revolution Bolshevik party, that the USSR inherited from the capitalist Russian empire. The new “socialist” working class sprang and dissented from the old “capitalist” proletariat. Due to the oil industry boom in the 1920s, the new “socialist” working class emerged in Baku around 5 years before the similar transformation of the all-USSR working movement.
The specific class interest of the new “socialist” working class was directly connected with its nature, which appeared different from the nature of the capitalist proletariat. The latter was a handicapped class because it lacked the skill and staff to manage the industrial enterprises and technological processes. The capitalist proletariat was a Siamese twin to the capitalist bourgeoisie; they were interconnected by the bourgeoisie’s lower strata of the management and technical specialists who ran the factories manned by the capitalist proletariat. The Bolsheviks actively used the pre-Revolution managerial and technological staff to run their factories. However, after rejecting the idea of giving up the oil fields and adjacent industries to the global oil corporations as concessions, the Bolsheviks moved a large portion of the young industrial workers to the technical schools in Baku, Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and other centres of education. The special bureaus attentively supervised the career of the party’s pupils after they graduated and promoted them to executive positions in the industry.
At the end of the 1920s, this new group of managers and technicians achieved the position of importance and sometimes control over the industrial facilities in Baku. The new “socialist” working class enjoyed the unparallel capability to manage the industry in comparison to the managerial and technological disability of the old capitalist proletariat. More of that, the new generation of industrial managers, being the upper strata of the new working class, was able and aspired to move ahead onto the level of political management, governance of the industrial clusters and branches, and territories. By the end of the 1920s, the latter function exclusively belonged to the Bolshevik functionaries, mostly of the pre-Revolutionary and Civil War generation. They clang to it because it brought them the political power and pleasures of life in abundance of the NEP.
The new managerial generation challenged the old-Bolshevik functionaries. And it challenged the clan foundation of the Bolshevik power because the new managers and technicians learned another, much more effective model of the administrative organization, that of the advanced oil industry. The clash was inevitable. It was the “classic” Marxian class struggle of the new “socialist” working class led by its managerial strata against the conservative capitalist proletariat led by the “old Bolsheviks.” Thus, the growth of the new working class in the Baku oil fields became the first evidence of the social split that would throw the Bolshevik party-state to the devastation of the undeclared Civil War in the second half of the 1930s.
Together with other Bolshevik middle-level managers of the new post-Revolutionary generation, Beria had to choose between clan loyalty and class loyalty. For him, it was also a straining personal choice because he was patronaged in his career by the old Bolsheviks. Beria was lucky that he had among his clan superiors the intellectuals, – Orakhelashvili, Kirov, Lominadze, and of course Stalin, – who understood the emergence of the new working class by their Marxian insight and political instincts. They separated Beria’s fidelity and business efficiency from his new and then exotic social affiliation. Beria was allowed to associate himself with the Baku new working class and serve its interests everywhere he could. As the vice-chief of the Transcaucasian GPU and chief of its operational directorate, Beria launched a series of secret police campaigns against the former capitalist managers and technicians in the Baku oil industry and the “old Bolshevik” functionaries in the territorial and branch administration. His ravaging of those opponents of the new “socialist” working class opened faster and higher progress of its managerial strata into industrial administration and political power.
Beria was not first and alone in his efforts. The change in industrial and political staff in AzSSR was pursued by the Azeri Communist Party leader in 1926 – 1929 and one of Beria’s key protectors from the Baku underground of 1919 – 1920, Mirzoyan. The reshuffling of the Transcaucasian clan’s political and administrative level was launched by another of his protectors and personal friend, Lominadze, who became the leader of the Transcaucasian Bolsheviks in 1930. There was nothing similar in all other regions of the USSR. Only in Leningrad (former S-Petersburg), whereinto Kirov moved from Baku in 1926 to become the regional party leader, the Bolshevik organization and industrial management were rearranged and staffed with the new people in the same way.
S-Petersburg and Baku were the main concentrations of the capitalist proletariat in the Russian Empire. Here and there, the proletariat was deployed in the technologically advanced huge industrial facilities developed by the international financial capital. It was the paramount pattern of Lenin’s concept of imperialism, “the highest stage of the capitalism and eve of the socialist revolution”. In 1921 Kirov launched industrial politics favouring the emergence of the new working class. He was a proponent of the fast promotion of its educated strata in Baku, Azerbaijan and Transcaucasia. Beria was one of Kirov’s main protegees and collaborators. Since 1926 Kirov repeated his social efforts in Leningrad, although in Leningrad the “new” working class was long deprived of the potential that it enjoyed in Transcaucasia due to the oil boom in Baku. Vacating Baku and Transcaucasia, Kirov remained the “outer” Transcaucasians’ leader like Stalin. Kirov closely controlled the clan’s affairs and patronaged Lominadze, Mirzoyan, and Beria.
The new “socialist” classes upstarted in Soviet Transcaucasia at the end of the 1920s – the beginning of the 1930s not only in the oil-booming urban terrain but also in the countryside. They surged in Transcaucasia at the same time as in other regions of the USSR but their emergence here had a rather different profile. Unlike almost all other Soviet regions, in Transcaucasia, the former upper classes of the countryside of the Russian Empire were not annihilated or exiled during the long and merciless Civil War of 1918 – 1921. In Transcaucasia, the civil war was brief. It took a couple of months in Georgia and Armenia and it did not burst at all in Azerbaijan. In Transcaucasia, Bolsheviks declared the intention not to slay and oust but appease and accommodate the debris of the former upper classes due to their importance to the local ethnic affairs. When simultaneously with the enforcement of collective farming, the rich peasants were swept away by mass deportation over all of the USSR at the end of the 1920s, civil war returned to Transcaucasia. The local peasantry grouped against the policy around its traditional patriarchal leaders of the former landowner nobles, and clergy, and it was inspired by the nationalistic intellectuals who considered both campaigns being doom to the national identity.
However, at the same time as the pre-revolutionary peasants rose in Transcaucasia fighting for the traditional values, the new class-bound social groups entered the countryside as the enforcers of the Bolshevik’s Grand Breakthrough. First of all, they consisted of the recent peasants who moved a few years before from the demographically overcrowded villages to the cities looking for new opportunities in the industry. It was not surprising that the Baku oil fields and adjacent industries attracted the newcomers to their labour-hungry growth. Some of the migrants remained marginals straddling between the peasant mentality and industrial reality, and others of them, more flexible and inclined to changes, entered the new working class. When the Bolsheviks launched their “socialist transformation of agriculture,” the latter eagerly supported it by returning to their countryside where they looked for much better social prospects than before.
There were hundreds of thousands of them in the USSR and tens of thousands in Transcaucasia, it was the resettlement of the invasion scale. The re-migrants rushed to take over the countryside from the former top classes of pre-revolutionary landowners and the NEP rich farmers. They had the full support of the GPU, and Beria became one of the main executives of the change in Transcaucasia. The resettlement was carried out by the same group that directed the social lift of the new working class and promotion of its managerial strata, – Lominadze, Mirzoyan, Bagirov, and Beria. It was the dramatic story of the secret police infiltration and blow-up of the nationalistic underground; drastic military “mass operations” with machineguns and artillery; transborder raids on the emigrant bases in the Iranian and Turkish frontier; pitiless deportations and prison camps. It was the class struggle of the kind and scale that was predicted by radical Marxism; it ruined a large share of the countryside and enforced on it the new social domination.
From the end of the 1920s – the beginning of the 1930s, Transcaucasia looked like the political landscape where a broad coalition arose against the group of the Bolsheviks to which Beria belonged. The coalition consisted of the pre-revolutionary countryside masters and rich NEP farmers; former capitalist managers and technicians; nationalistic intellectuals and repressed Tsarist officials. Alongside them the old capitalist proletariat lost its importance in the “socialist” transformation of the industry; and the old Bolsheviks of the pre-Revolution underground, the proletariat’s political vanguard, lost their power to the upstart managers of the new working class. The bureaucracy sacrificed the party-state’s efficiency to their egotist targets. Society was undermined by the opposition that was inspired by the emigration and fed by the foreign intelligence services. The inter-clan competition and quarrel of the ideological factions eroded the integrity of the Bolshevik party and its capability to make up and implement political decisions. In the same landscape the new, unseen and unthought-before social classes advanced into the industrial, agricultural, and administrative authority, – the managing strata of the “socialist” working class and the class of the Soviet agricultural executives. Their leaders invaded politics. It was the multi-vector social battlefield. The challengers of class war required emergency solutions. Beria’s promotion to the office of Transcaucasia’s boss was among them.
The fast oil industry development in Baku had other particular consequences as well, they were national. The skilled strata of the pre-Revolution capitalist proletariat in Baku consisted of the Russian, Jewish, Armenian, Georgian, Ukrainian, Polish, and German migrants. The aborigine Turks, the common ethnic name for the different Turkic-speaking communities of Transcaucasia, composed its unskilled strata. The Bolsheviks paid major efforts to change this composition because it contradicted their vision of the communist labour movement. The high-skilled and top-placed groups of the Turks emerged in the oil fields and adjacent industries. They were bound not only by their language, tribal association and Muslim origin but also by their common class interest.
The new Azeri working class obtained its high educated strata as well. It was the managing and political group different from the pre-Revolutionary Turkic intellectuals of mostly aristocratic origin, educated in Russian universities and fascinated with the Ottoman culture. They were dissociated from most Turks who lived in the countryside communities under the patriarchal authority of their landowner-beys and Muslim clergy. The new educated strata of the Turk’s working class belonged to the grassroots Turks. The growth of the native Turkic working class and its educated strata in the oil industry was the process in which the modern Azerbaijani ethnic nation was consolidated by the thought-over Marxist industrial and social development.
In the Baku underground of 1919-1920, Beria was patronaged by the Turk socialists Karaev, Huseynov, Ildrym. Entering the Azeri ChK he established close comradeship with the Azeri ChK chief and later party boss Turk Mir Jafar Baghirov, who was another prime protegee and operative of Kirov. During a year and a half in the office of Bagirov’s deputy and chief of Azeri ChK operations, Beria fixed the close ties with other Azeri Turks mostly of his post-Revolutionary generation in the AzSSR government. One of them was Gazanfar Musabekov, an administrative manager, who would be Beria’s right hand in governing the Transcaucasian economy in the 1930s, the true maker of the region’s economic miracle.
From the very beginning of his ascent in the Transcaucasian Bolshevik and ChK – GPU hierarchy Beria comprehended his career as a personal path conjoined with the rise of the Azeri “socialist” nation. The Bolsheviks consolidated it as not the “exclusive” ethnic nation of the Azeri Turks but the “inclusive” nation that embraced also the people of other ethnic groups of the AzSSR bound to the frame of the “socialist” Azeri nation by their class unity. The concept was authored by Kirov and Mirzoyan, Azerbaijan’s leaders in 1921 – 1929, and implemented mostly by the latter. After Mirzoyan had been removed to head the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan in 1933, he successfully repeated his “inclusive” nation-building. Following him, Beria worked to strengthen the Azeri “inclusive” socialist nation. He also looked out to engineer the model of economic development, industrial first of all, that was able to push ahead similar nation-building in two other Transcaucasian Soviet Republics of Georgia and Armenia.
It was the novel and breakthrough concept of nation, which was developed by the Bolshevik leaders in the Transcaucasia, Beria’s superior associates, and followed by him. It differed from the concept of the “exclusive” ethnic nation being distinguished by its language and culture that had been inherited by Bolsheviks from 19th century Marxism. The latter was implemented in the 1920s in Soviet Ukraine by such theorists and practicians as the former all-Russian ChK’s chief exterminator, Mykola Skrypnyk. The schism between two concepts and practices, “inclusive” Azeri-style class-framed and “exclusive” Ukrainian-style ethnic-shelled nations, would determine the course and outcome of the national policy in the pre-WWII USSR. Their clash would be also one of the most severe areas of the undeclared Civil War in the Bolshevik party-state in the second half of the 1930s.
Beria’s thoughtful association of himself with the rise of the new “socialist” classes and “inclusive” socialist nations was the pinnacle line of his life. It determined many of its events. Beria moved from the ChK – GPU to party-state politics as one of the leaders of the new “socialist” classes and nations. He was regarded by Stalin, Kirov, Kuybyshev and other top Bolsheviks as the political figure of the new classes and nations. They vested Beria with large decision-making and implementing autonomy to pursue the emancipation of the new classes and restructuring the nations to the new model. At the critically important 17th congress of the all-USSR Communist Party and closely following events, Beria declared the agenda of the new classes and nations.
Two of its issues were most important and became the battleground, the Mechanical Tractor Stations, MTS, and the newborn all-USSR commissariat of internal affairs, NKVD. The MTS were the institution in which the new Soviet agricultural executives amassed and from which they administered the countryside. The NKVD became the dominating enforcement agency with the secret police as one of its directorates. Both institutions were the novice “vertical” structures of the party-state which reported directly to the top leadership and opposed the traditional “horizontal” clan foundation of the Bolshevik power. The fight over them in the broad Bolshevik leadership pushed the severe political crisis. It culminated with two deaths, – the assassination of Kirov and Kuybyshev’s passing of a coronary thrombus. The demise of the supreme leaders of the two Bolshevik super-clans wrecked the clan foundation of the Bolshevik party-state. The party politics degraded to severe hostilities between the super-clans’ fragments. The messy social violence started in 1936. Together they are titled the Great Terror. The Bolshevik resurrection out of the disarray and rally of the party politics on the class foundation took three years. Beria’s participation in the recharge of the Bolshevik fortunes was decisive.
Beria, – in his private vicinity
Three social circles dominated Beria’s personality, – his family, professional colleagues and political mentors. Beria’s early life was built on his mother’s, Marta Jakeli’s, connections to her relatives among the Georgian nobility and Baku oil-rich Georgian community. These connections financed Beria’s expensive middle-class primary education in the municipal school in the Black Sea port of Sukhum and secondary education in the technical school in the Caspian city of Baku. The socialization in the Russified migrant community of Baku produced Beria’s “imperialistic” or “international” consciousness in the nationally-fragmented Transcaucasia. It secluded Beria’s Mingrelian ethnic nature in his private life and opened him to professional and political relations with people of different ethnic origins without prejudice and preference. Beria adapted to the multi-ethnos Transcaucasian Bolshevik clan in which he was protected by the Georgians, Russians, Armenians, Jews, Azeri Turks etc. and he picked up multi-ethnos accomplices to his ChK-based nucleus clan.
Beria’s initiatives against the Georgian opposition and immigration surprisingly diversified his personality. These two communities supplied to his surrounding people quite different from the Bolshevik activists and ChK operatives that had crowded it before. Beria’s new acquaintances, – a great writer Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, whom Beria fished out of the deadly Arctic prison camp, poet Paolo Yashvili and re-emigrant poet Nikholoz Mitsishvili, artists Lado Gudiashvili and Elene Akhvlediani, – were the intellectuals of the top class and “blue blood” Georgians as well. They introduced to Beria’s mentality more complicated constructions than the fierce class struggle and transformed him into a true Georgian national from a bleak mixture of the Baku oil migration, Russian imperial education and Bolshevik internationalism. Beria’s transformation took place in his early 30s, the age when a man takes mental shape and tempers the soul axis for all his further life.
The Tiflis Bohemian community in which Beria socialized together with his Bolshevik party patrons Lominadze and Levan Gogoberidze, discloses also one of the most thrilling secrets of Beria, his liaisons with women. Contrary to the widespread rumours, Beria was not a wild womanizer; his affairs look rare, deep and of the topmost class. Beria’s life-long pair with Nino Gegechkori is the best example of them. Another example was hinted at by the Italian diplomat, the council in Tiflis in the last third of the 1920s, Petro Quaroni. It was Beria’s affair with Maria Bagrationi, a daughter of Prince Georgy Bagrationi-Mukhransky, the heir of the Georgian Crown, and sister of Leonida, the spouse of the Russian imperial grand prince Vladimir Romanov and grandmother of the current Russian imperial pretender Georgy Romanov.
Besides the pronounced blue blood in her veins and upper monarchist connections, Maria was a highly gifted theatrical artist, an inspirer of Simon Virsaladze, the decorator of the world-famous Leningrad ballets of Yury Grigorovich. Maria remained Beria’s faithful comrade at the end of the 1940s when she was jailed and evicted from Georgia with many men and women close to Beria. Beria’s love affairs in the 1930s, alleged and real, followed the line. His supposed lovers, – cinema and theatre actresses Bella Beletskaya and Aleksandra Toidze, opera singer Ekaterina Sokhadze, and even his office assistant Vardo Maksimilashvili, who turned out one of the best female operatives of the Soviet intelligence during WWII, – were the match of the exquisite stock. In the 1920s and 1930s, the time of messy wicked affairs, Beria’s liaisons portray the epoch more in romantic and bright than dirty colours.
Beria in the clan politics and Bolshevik ideology
The emergence of the new “socialist” classes and the advance of their managerial strata influenced the Transcaucasian Bolshevik clan as well as the Turkestanian one. Many of the middle-level executives of both clans fell into the team that was committed to the new “socialist” classes. Soon they demonstrated more class loyalty than clan discipline. The top Bolshevik leadership closely supervised the emergence of the new classes and ambitions of its political strata. But it was surprised when it faced the mutiny of the middle-level party-state officials which were self-associated with new classes. It is the reason why their first performance was treated by the Politburo leaders as a conspiracy.
The suspects secretly knotted the faction which was detected and penetrated by the OGPU. The details of the OGPU’s investigation demonstrated how the Bolshevik clans used the governmental institutions for their competition. Wrestling the position of the Azeri Bolshevik boss, the Turkestanians hired one of the OGPU professional clans, that of Yefim Yevdokimov. Yevdokimov launched the surveillance over Lominadze and infiltrated the close retinue of his political partner and co-thinker, Sergey Syrtsov. Syrtsov was a protegee of Kuybyshev, the head of Soviet Russia’s government and former Siberian party leader. Beria was the most experienced GPU operative in Lominadze’s retinue but Yevdokimov was no lesser experienced and gifted operative than him. Yevdokimov was the head of the OGPU’s central operational directorate and enjoyed much more resources than Beria. He outplayed Beria, stalked Lominadze and exposed Syrtsov.
Yevdokimov collected plenty of evidence to accuse both Syrtsov and Lominadze of preparing to overthrow Stalin from his position of the Bolshevik’s general secretary. Stalin had nothing against the political experiment of the promotion of the new classes’ leaders into politics. He also understood the damage of the setup against Lominadze for his native Transcaucasian clan. But Stalin was cornered by Kuybyshev to smash the faction that masterminded a dangerous coup. In October – November of 1930 both Syrtsov and Lominadze were ostracized and deprived of their political positions, their retainers were arrested and their supporters were steam-rolled. The Transcaucasian Bolshevik branch was especially devastated; Beria remained the sole regional official of the top and middle levels who kept up his office. Besides Stalin’s and Kirov’s need to care about their Transcaucasian clan, his association with the new classes was his main defence.
The top Bolsheviks couldn’t have afforded to alienate the new classes’ political strata, especially in the oil-booming Transcaucasia. Syrtsov and Lominadze were crushed because OGPU disclosed their malign political ambitions. Beria was not found guilty. Beria survived and after a year of intrigues and uncertainty, he succeeded Lominadze as the Transcaucasian party-state boss. At the same time, he became the onsite supervisor over the Transcaucasian Bolshevik clan reporting to its superiors, Stalin and Kirov. Beria’s appointment was promoted by Stalin and Kirov and approved by Kuybyshev who visited the Caucasian Black Sea resorts with his extravagant entourage and blessed Beria. Beria was encouraged to run the economic and administrative policy on behalf of the new “socialist” classes because the Bolshevik Politburo top viewed them as the new social foundation of the Bolshevik party-state and resource of their regime.
It was stunning that Beria’s political survival was maintained by the Turkestanian clan’s upstart who soon became Beria’s personal friend, Nikolay Yezhov. Yezhov was just promoted by Kuybyshev to supervise the party’s personnel. Before the appointment, Yezhov had tasted the rise of the new agricultural executives in the Soviet countryside as the vice-agricultural commissar. With his unrivalled skill of paper-pushing, Yezhov detained the orders of Beria’s prosecution and managed to convince Stalin and Kuybyshev that Beria was necessary for the urgent affairs in the OGPU and Transcaucasia. Beria and Yezhov were little known to each other at the moment, it was not the personal affiliation that attracted Yezhov to Beria’s defence but the class adhesion.
Beria’s relentless onslaught on the old Bolshevik industrial and administrative bureaucracy and his intense theoretical activity followed in the next three years. Beria took over the management of the Baku oil industrial cluster and started the huge industrial programs in Georgia, – rare-metal refining, coal-mining and machinery, – and in Armenia, – chemical industry and copper metallurgy. He looked to repeat the pattern of Azerbaijan’s successful transformation into an “inclusive” socialist nation. And Beria pushed ahead the resettlement of the new Soviet agricultural executives to the countryside in parallel with expelling out of it the former peasant communal leaders, – pre-Revolution landowners, rich NEP farmers, and clergy.
Beria’s economic achievements, managed by Musabekov, were stunning. In a few years the Baku oil industry doubled, cotton farming tripled and farming of tropical fruits, grapes and tea multiplied. The Transcaucasian oil fueled the USSR’s Stalinist miracles of the heavy industry, modern infrastructure and engine-driven Red Army. The Transcaucasian cotton, rare metals, copper and rubber paid to the Soviet textile, machinery, and auto car boom. The Transcaucasian delicious food, – vine, fruits, tea, – swept away their tiny import and became one of a few luxuries of Soviet everyday life.
The human price of the Transcaucasian economic miracle was heavy. The hundreds of thousands of peasants were deported to the Eurasian North where they died out of privation and heavy labour. Other tens of thousands of them were compelled to move to the towns breaking their traditional communal and religious affiliation and living the miserable life of the unskilled workforce. The thousands of the pre-revolutionary proletarians lost their privileged position and were beaten into submission to the upstart youngsters of the new management; hundreds of old-time intellectuals were exiled and tens of underground nationalists were executed. It was the landscape of ruthless uncompromising transformation by the monopoly of the vision and violence.
The monopoly of violence is the matter that often attract scholars to Beria’s figure. His monopoly of vision escapes their close attention. However, in his books of the early 1930s, composed mainly of his reports at the different Transcaucasian Bolshevik meetings and paper articles, his axial commitment to the strengthening of the new socialist classes and taking over the industrial, administrative and political management from pre-Revolution technicians, clan-based bureaucracy and old-Bolshevik elite is pronounced. The Transcaucasian economic, social, personnel, and cultural policy in the first half of the 1930s, the period of Beria’s governance over the region, was not, as it is sometimes labelled, the chaotic implementation of Moscow’s commands. It was the rigid and orderly march towards the clear-cut class objectives of Beria’s and his mentors’ vision.
Much discussed Beria’s book On history of the Bolshevik organizations in Transcaucasia published in the middle of 1935, was the quintessence of this vision. Its concept was made up by Kirov, its facts were collected by Stalin’s old Transcaucasian mate Malakia Toroshelidze, and its main narrative was produced by two Marxist historians, – Semen Fayermark and Erik Bedia. Beria shaped its discourse and Stalin combed its conclusions. The book became a novel layout of the Bolsheviks’ pre-Revolution past. It uplifted Stalin’s party position from the management of the Transcaucasian socialists to the co-running of the all-Russian revolutionary movement together with Lenin. This vision favoured Stalin’s reputation personally but it was much more important that it refurbished the Bolshevik history for the change of clan politics to class politics. It also sunk the old-Bolshevik clan elite in favour of the new managerial generation. It was the reason why Beria’s book, devoted to the local matters of the past, received such big importance in the Bolshevik ideology.
Beria in the new Bolshevik landscape
The accents of Beria’s politics and theories were heard not only by his mentors and comrades but also by the clan-based groups that marked him their arch-enemy. The eve of the first and second thirds of the 1930s became the period of the next outburst of accusations against Beria. His foes claimed that he betrayed the Bolshevik Baku and Tiflis underground in 1919 – 1920 to the Musavatist Azeri and Georgian Menshevik nationalists, British and Ottoman Turkish intelligence services. Some former Beria’s colleagues and handlers in the underground were hired by his foes to produce much more solid allegations than at the beginning of the 1920s.
But it was more perilous that Beria’s enemies secured the support of one of the topmost Bolsheviks, the man who is often considered Beria’s mentor, although the facts tell the opposite, Ordzhonikidze. Despite his upper all-USSR offices of the heavy industry’s commissar and the Politburo’s member, Ordzhonikidze believed that his position was clan-based and considered himself the master of Transcaucasia. Soon after Beria was promoted to the Transcaucasia governor, they clashed over the control over the Baku oil industry. Their schism deepened over the staff appointments in Transcaucasia and representation of the Transcaucasian Bolsheviks on the all-USSR level. It was an untreatable rift, a personal contest that soon became full-scale hostilities between their retinues and institutions at their disposal.
At the beginning of the 1930s, the clear decline of the Bolshevik clan structure turned many of the Bolshevik middle-level officials to association with the new classes, similar to Kirov, Syrtsov, Lominadze, Beria, Baghirov, and Yezhov. But it also turned others to the opposing structural idea of the socially-independent officialdom that can rule over the society as a self-sufficient stratum. The idea was highly attractive because it followed the Lenin-inspired image of the Party-Order whose members, like the monks of the religious orders of the Middle Ages, consecrate their life to the Communist cause. The idea of the self-sufficient officialdom also allured the Bolshevik executives since it secured their privileged social position unlike the model oriented to the new social classes that required risky mobility and responsibility to the class controllers. The group of the order-officialdom makers was led by Kuybyshev’s top protegees, Andrey Andreyev and Lazar Kaganovich, both the Politburo’s members at the beginning of the 1930s. They launched a series of party-state rearrangements to lift the executive personnel from social preoccupation and build it up as the bureaucratic machine lubricated by the privileges and decent consumption amongst the Grand Breakthrough’s deficit of food, and goods and services. They introduced the orderly pattern of the executives’ recruiting and promotion, reward and punishment.
Since Leon Trotsky’s accusations, it is Stalin who is considered the creator of the egotist Bolshevik party-state apparatus. He was not; Stalin was more inclined to the party construction bound to the new classes. The apparatus was born inside the Turkestanian clan which rivalled Stalin’s Transcaucasians; Kuybyshev’s accomplices Andreyev and Kaganovich presided over the apparatus’ emergence. The order-officialdom makers were not Beria’s outright enemies, unlike the clan-thinking old Bolsheviks. And they considered Beria’s position, as well as the positions of other executives who were associated with the new classes like Yezhov, as a variation of the order-officialdom structure. Beria cooperated with them in the current affairs and when the time come, they would be his allies in destiny-making matters. Nevertheless, the leaders of the new classes clashed with the proponents of the order-officialdom over a variety of issues. The rival call-up of the fast-growing executives to their ranks was the most important of them. Both groups could boast the success while the affiliation of the most important newcomers, Andrey Zhdanov, the Leningrad party boss since 1934, and Nikita Khrushchëv, the Moscow party boss since the same year, remained unclear.
In sum, the Soviet political landscape became much more diverse and conflicting in the middle of the 1930s than before. Two Bolshevik super-clans, Transcaucasian and Turkestanian, continued existing as well as dozens of the middle-level territorial and departmental clans with twisty affiliations. Between the latter, there was Beria’s private Transcaucasian ChK-GPU clan that incorporated new members in the broader regional party-state after Beria was appointed the regional boss. And the private GPU clan of Beria’s arch-enemy Yefim Yevdokimov, based in the Yevdokimov “home region” of North Caucasia, was growing up. Some of the party-state executives, like Kirov, Beria, Yezhov, and Baghirov, associated themselves with the new socialist classes over their clan loyalty. Others of the top executives, like Andreyev and Kaganovich, moved to construct the order-officialdom apparatus across the clan boundaries. A lot of newcomers on the Bolshevik top, like Zhdanov and Khrushchëv were playing in the middle. The “inclusive” Azerbaijan-style nation-building clashed with the “exclusive” Ukrainian-style nationalistic stance. The contradiction between all of them might have been settled by bargaining in the long run according to the shift of their economic and social weight. Or their power struggle could have driven them to a violent burst. The avalanche of events made the choice, it was neither Stalin who triggered it nor Beria.
Beria and the doom of the Bolshevik leaders
The assassination of Kirov in December 1934 and the death of Kuybyshev in January 1935 overturned the Bolshevik party politics. Both of them were the leaders of their super-clans, respectively Transcaucasians and Turkestanians, together they bound the heterogeneous multiplicity of the regional and departmental clans to the top Bolshevik Politburo leadership synchronizing their decision-making and practical activity into the integral and solid Bolshevik policy. After Kirov and Kuybyshev had perished the bridles failed and chaos erupted. The assassination of Kirov, Beria’s mentor since his intelligence trips to Menshevik Georgia in the middle of the 1920s, became a personal challenge to Beria; he investigated it as the plenipotentiary of the Transcaucasian clan. Kuybyshev’s death led to the fast complete disintegration of the Turkestanian clan. Its topmost executives, – Andreyev, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Yezhov, Khrushchëv, – and the fresh Yezhov-trained party personnel and inner control directors, respectively, Georgiy Malenkov and Matvey Shkiryatov, rushed to change their affiliation.
However, Stalin did not absorb them into the structure of the Transcaucasian clan. He bound them as his political retinue of the all-party leader following the concept of Beria’s book On history of the Bolshevik organizations in Transcaucasia. Beria and other top Transcaucasians were upgraded to this novel accommodation as well. The accommodation was well-suited to both actual concepts of the party-state, those of the order-officialdom and the bond to the new socialist classes. It was the moment when the debris executives of the Turkestanian clan became Stalin’s men by their heart and some of them turned to the close cooperation and personal friendship with Beria.
The disintegration of the former clan foundation of the Bolshevik party-state virtually finished most of the local clans including Beria’s. Just recently it enlarged from its Transcaucasian ChK nucleus to the broader entity embracing regional political figures. It fell out despite its successes. The old and new members of the vanishing clans preferred their professional and political affiliation to the clan discipline. The basic Beria’s accomplices with whom he started his political climb at the beginning of 1920, Lordkipanidze and Kiladze, left the clan. The fidelity of some others, – Agniashvili, Stansky, Pirumov, Zubov, – became doubtful. Beria was able to substitute his old comrades of uncertain loyalty with the recruits that he brought up in his special operations, – Sergey Goglidze, Vsevolod Merkulov, Avksentiy Rapava, brothers Bogdan and Amayak Kobulov, Solomon Milshtein, Mikhail Gvishiani and Lavrentiy Tsanava. It was the daredevil team to storm any heights, nevertheless, Beria became much more vulnerable without his “old guard.” His only choice was to build up the new retinue based not on the clan but on new-classes social bonds, Georgian nationalistic vigour and professional order. His strengthening ties with the new top-Bolshevik team, – Yezhov, Khrushchëv, Zhdanov, Malenkov, Shkiryatov, – and his fastening personal alliance with Stalin were the new pillars of Beria’s position in the middle of the 1930s.
Beria’s investigation of Kirov’s assassination demonstrated the fast change in his political environment, agenda and means of action. The details of the investigation are hidden however their reconstruction is important for the understanding of the situation in the Bolshevik top leadership on the eve of the Great Terror. Kirov’s demise was the second high-level assassination in Beria’s career as a secret police operative and investigator. The first one he experienced during the decisive rise of his career, in March of 1925, when his political and professional patrons in the Transcaucasian clan, respectively, Myasnikyan and Mogilevsky, perished in the plane crash over the Tiflis suburb almost under Beria’s eyes. The wreck was ascribed by his superiors to a technical accident however Beria investigated sabotage. At that time the death of Myasnikyan brought Ordzhonikidze to the top power in Transcaucasia. The change worsened Beria’s position since Beria’s communication with Ordzhonikidze was not smooth due to the latter’s dictatorial ambitions. Thanks to Beria’s gifts as an operative, mastermind and spy-handler, he took over the office of the Transcaucasian GPU’s chief of operations despite the lack of Mogilevsky’s patronage; his ruthless perfection in suppressing the Georgian revolt in 1924 purchased him Ordzhonikidze’s favour instead of Mysanikyan’s. However, Beria was a vengeful person, he never stopped his investigation of the 1925 plane crash and collected the data to disclose its mystery.
Four figures followed Mogilevsky in the office of the Transcaucasian GPU’s chief, – Zinoviy Katsnelson, Aleksander Kaul, Ivan Pavlunovsky and Stanislav Redens. They mostly supported Beria but checked his career. Pavlunovsky befriended Ordzhonikidze and when Ordzhonikidze moved to Moscow to head the Bolshevik’s inner party control, he took Pavlunovsky as his departmental director. The simple comparison of the plane-crush assassination of Myasnikyan and Mogilevsky in 1925 and Kirov’s assassination in 1934 revealed a strange coincidence. Ordzhonikidze appeared the most personally interested in the demise of both Myasnikyan and Kirov. They both were his contenders for the control over the Transcaucasian clan; as in 1925 as in 1934 Ordzhonikidze had in his entourage highly capable and well-resourced GPU operatives, respectively, Pankratov and Pavlunovsky. Beria followed the surprising lead by applying his OGPU and Transcaucasian connections in a ruthless and ingenuous way.
His investigation of Kirov’s death disclosed the Transcaucasian inner-clan politics with its devil ambitions and vice corruption. Kirov’s death was linked to the deaths of the two top Transcaucasian figures, the Abkhazian boss Nestor Lakoba and Armenian boss Agasi Khandjian. Beria is often declared guilty in their death by his evil manipulations or direct killing. It is considered that Beria poisoned Lakoba and shot down Khandjian; the facts deny the former and rather support the latter. Beria was a killer, no doubt, and he lived in the surrounding of highly suspicious and aggressive people most of whom were skilled with guns and viewed the opponent’s demise as the normal result of political failure. Beria’s shooting at his political opponents showed him not crazy violent but rational to survive. And he looks better than his colleagues who preferred to be arrested, tortured and slaughtered. Because if all of them had shot their attackers, the Great Terror would not have started. When Beria finally confronted Ordzhonikidze on the Sunday evening of 18 February 1937, Beria presented him with plenty of evidence for the sincere discussion and grim suicidal mood.
Three upper Bolshevik deaths in the middle of the 1930s, – that of Kirov, Kuybyshev, and Ordzhonikidze, – disclosed the opposition groups in the broad Bolshevik leadership and their perilous association with the former “capitalist” classes, – the proletariat, peasantry, and middle-class townsfolk. The aggression of the leaders of the new “socialist” classes and order-officialdom was directed against them. In the middle of 1936, the social aggressors unleashed political repressions against the regional and departmental clans that were bound to the former “capitalist” classes. Their theoretical program was narrated in the unpublished Yezhov’s manuscript on the class struggle in the socialist society. And Beria’s article in the main Bolshevik newspaper Pravda published on the opening day of the First Moscow Show-Trial, 19 August 1936, became their practical guideline.
Beria and Stalin
Stalin accepted Beria in the top politics as a representative of the new “socialist” classes, a member of their managerial strata uplifted on the political level. Stalin and Beria had too different tempers and mentality to be personally close, however, the burning political air of the second third of the 1930s smelted them into a kind of alloy. Stalin looked to Beria as the top expert of the secret police affairs and effective handler of the Transcaucasian clan; Beria needed Stalin as the indispensable political leader. Since that time Beria was involved in the making up of the political decisions of the first importance and sometimes, besides his immediate responsibility, he ran some special affairs. Among them, there was the investigation of Kirov’s assassination. The authoring of On history of the Bolshevik organizations in Transcaucasia and working out of the Azerbaijani “inclusive” pattern of the Soviet national policy for implementation in other Soviet republics instead of the discredited Ukrainian “exclusive” ethnic-confining model were his other occasional assignments.
Stalin’s personal security during his long “vacations” in the Black Sea Caucasian resorts became the Beria’s responsibility since his promotion to the office of the GPU’s chief in Transcaucasia in April of 1931. Beria succeeded in preventing or destroying a few attempts on Stalin’s life. Beria also survived a few attempts on his life thanks to his operative instincts and skill. The facts and circumstances of the attempts convince that they were neither a fruit of propagandist fantasy nor Beria’s nasty game to catch Stalin’s favour. The attempts were supervised by the Japanese military intelligence in the aftermath of Japan’s occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and in preparation for its imminent clash with the USSR, which happened in July-August 1938 at Khasan Lake, and in May-September 1938 at the river Khalkhin-Gol in Mongolia. The attempts on Stalin fell through due to the hurry of the Japanese who took over the Transcaucasian emigrant groups, ready-made to carry the attempts out, from their former sponsors of the Polish and Entente intelligence. The groups had been infiltrated and were monitored by Beria’s moles and agents in Europe and the Far East; and the Transcaucasia’s frontier with Turkey and Iran, wherefrom the saboteurs penetrated it, was ploughed by the raids of the GPU troops.
In the second third of the 1930s, Beria was not a bell-boy but an inferior political associate of Stalin with the freedom of choice of his political priorities and means of action. Following Stalin in the general trend, Beria determined his agenda and made the alliances according to his vision of the current needs of the new “socialist” classes in Transcaucasia and over the USSR. At the end of 1936, Beria, together with Yezhov, Zhdanov, and Khrushchëv, launched the campaign to track, disclose and shut down the underground units of Leon Trotsky’s followers among the party-state executives. Their second objective was to ravage the Trotskists social base in the pre-Revolution capitalist proletariat. Neither Beria nor his allies might have predicted that the campaign pushes the avalanche of the Great Terror.
Beria and unfolding of the Great Terror
Beria in the Transcaucasia and Zhdanov in his former “home region” of Nizhniy Novgorod – Gorky, and his new allotment of Leningrad, and Khrushchëv in Moscow, were most prominent among the few Bolshevik regional leaders who supported Yezhov in the implementation of his inspiring theory of the class struggle in the socialist society. Yezhov much upgraded Marxism illuminating this critical problem of the post-capitalist society that neither the patriarch pair of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels nor their Russian modifier Lenin dared to forecast. After Syrtsov’s and Lominadze’s making out of the new “socialist” classes, it seemed to be the most important revelation for the understanding of the Soviet reality. Not only theoretical freshers like Beria, Khrushchëv and Zhdanov were fascinated, but Stalin also invited Yezhov’s theory with enthusiasm. Meanwhile, explaining the evil purposes of the old capitalist classes and their political agents, proposing harsh means of the party-state to safeguard the “socialist achievements,” Yezhov did not impose the bridles on violence. When he had taken over the office of the USSR’s commissar for Internal Affairs, violence soon broke out from any limits and rationality.
Beria’s biography discloses that the Great Terror was not the unitary party-state policy, as it is normally considered, and not the chaos of the low- and middle-level executives’ ambitions as it is depicted sometimes. It was the well-calculated venture of the knot-group of the top-level officials who occupied the party-state institutions of violence and used them to pursue the interests of their favourite social classes. During the Great Terror’s beginning, until their split at its height, it was the cohesive group of Yezhov. His close mates Zhdanov, Khrushchëv, Beria, Baghirov, Malenkov, and Shkiryatov were its main participants. They were the political minority among the Bolshevik executives, and they served the new “socialist” classes of the Soviet society.
The Great Terror was the dual system of, first, the political persecution of the power-groups in the Bolshevik party-state representing the pre-Revolution capitalist classes, the proletariat and petty-bourgeoisie peasantry, and, second, social suppression of these classes. The long-run curfew on the former’s political ambitions and the blow preventing the latter to consolidate into the integral “Anti-Soviet” counter-socialist super-class were the objectives of those actions. The hostile power groups became the target of the pointed personalized attacks, and the alien classes became the target of the indiscriminating “mass operations.” They were launched simultaneously and overlapped; it is the reason why scholars tend to mix them up in their narrative of the Great Terror. However, they had distinctively different targets, paces and consequences.
The nature of the assault on the hostile power groups is revealed in detail in the papers of the all-party-state discussion on the eve of the Great Terror and during its unfolding that embraced the period from summer of 1936 to autumn of 1937. The plenum assemblies of the Central Committee, the decision-making body of the all-USSR Communist Party, and the newspaper articles were its main platform. Beria took an active part in both of the fields, – he became one of the sharpest speakers at the plenums and published some of the key articles. Beria’s speeches and remarks, especially those to Yezhov’s pinnacle presentations, as well as Beria’s articles explain his vision of the targeted groups and the scale and pace of their destruction.
In his vision, not only the followers of Leon Trotsky and Grigoriy Zinoviev were the political agents of the pre-Revolution capitalist proletariat, hostile to the novel socialist society. The regional and departmental bosses of the clans based on the pre-Revolution underground Bolshevik units were full of subversive minds and activity as well. At the same time the bulk of the middle-level officials, who entered the Bolshevik party and power institutions during the Civil War and especially the NEP, were the timid political agents of the petty-bourgeoisie peasantry and the NEP’s capitalists of the urban industrial and farming stock. Yezhov’s and Beria’s identification of the hostile party-state units directed the edge of the persecution against those two power groups. It resulted in the total extermination of the old Bolsheviks and decimation of the Civil War and NEP Bolshevik generation. The statistics of the arrests among the members of the Communist Party’s Central Committee at and immediately after its key plenum in June of 1937 show Beria as the main nominator and beneficiary of the arrests. And it also shows that Beria considered the arrests at the plenum as the final blow at the opposition inside the party-state, not the springboard of the following bloody avalanche.
Yezhov’s and Beria’s plan also included the suppression of the hostile power groups’ social base among the old capitalist proletariat, peasantry and former NEP industrialists and farmers. However, Beria proposed the suppression technique similar to the pinpoint attacks on hostile political groups. He planned to pick up and disable their activists, mostly by their permanent exile to the remote Arctic labour camps. As the most wholesale measure, he demanded to prevent the people deported at the beginning of the 1930s to return to their home regions. They had been removed far away for their resistance to the introduction of collective farming, forced industrial development and cancellation of the market economy. They were mostly the NEP’s rich farmers and town industrialists, clergy and pre-Revolution landowners. Beria believed that they would ferment the wide resistance against the party-state and challenge the social domination of the new “socialist” classes. He viewed the Great Terror limited as that. He did not propose indiscriminating summary executions of the hundreds of thousands of people judged by their social classification. It was his underestimation of the harsh class struggle that was pushed ahead by Yezhov.
Beria’s biography reveals the exact moment when Beria stepped away from Yezhov’s directing of the Great Terror. Beria abhorred their bloody running over his planned limitation and their diffusing from the pinpoint personalized approach to the bulk social destruction. The analysis of the Great Terror in Transcaucasia demonstrates the ratio between the annihilation of the party-state elite that was suspected of being hostile to the new “socialist” classes and the suppression of their broad social base. The ratio discloses Beria’s understanding of the class struggle in the socialist society. The substantial difference between the Beria-administered Great Terror in Transcaucasia and the Yezhov-directed Great Terror over all of the USSR was determined by this particular vision. Beria’s dissidence was allowed by Beria’s autonomy in the decision-making which was patronaged by Stalin. However, it was not long to wait when Beria’s dissidence would enrage Yezhov and bring on Beria the assault of Yezhov’s new power group, quite different from his attendees of the Great Terror’s beginning. Yezhov became much stronger with his new potential. But Beria became much stronger as well because Yezhov also alienated Zhdanov and Khrushchëv, and what was much more perilous, he turned Stalin against himself.
Beria and closing of the Great Terror
The scrutiny of the NKVD’s files on the hostile political groups and figures is important to discern the criminal intentions and actions of the convicts and forged accusations. It is critical to assess the former primarily not against the now-a-day laws or values but good and wrong of exactly that historic time. And it is important to digest the latter by the political rationality of the epoch. Only in this mirror, Beria’s physiognomy is liable to humanistic judgement. Contrary to many opinions, it looks not bloodthirsty and sadistic, but it had its ugly grimaces. One of them was Beria’s obsession with monopolistic control of the arrests, sentencing and execution in Transcaucasia. And another one was his hunting over the USSR for the former members of his professional entourage and renegades of his clan through whom his enemies might have linked him to some blamed oppositional figures to annihilate. It was a race of survival. Among a couple of hundreds of the party-state top officials in the centre and regions only a dozen or so mastered to keep on, – the regional leaders Zhdanov, Khrushchëv, Beria, Baghirov; the party apparatus’ departmental directors Malenkov and Shkiryatov (both Yezhiov’s protegees), the metallurgy’s commissar Ivan Tevosyan (Beria’s mate in the 1919 – 1920 Baku underground) and the state prosecutor Andrew Vyshinsky (Stalin’s mate in the Baku Bailov prison in 1908); a few of the top industrialists and militaries. Besides them and Stalin’s “tabu” Politburo comrades, – Vyacheslav Molotov, Kaganovich, Andreyev, Kliment Voroshilov, Mikhail Kalinin, – almost nobody survived.
Stalin and his comrades in Politburo, and the group of the new classes’ leaders designed the Great Terror with the limited political and social objectives. By the autumn of 1937, they were achieved. Further widening of the political persecutions and social suppression endangered the foundation of the party-state and deprived Stalin and his retinue of their political domination. However, deploying his double power as the USSR Internal Affairs’ commissar and the party’s secretary responsible for its purification and consolidation Yezhov mastered to continue the Great Terror and increase its range. Yezhov was building up the NKVD as the alternative centre of political power, and he started the struggle over the political hegemony against the Communist Party’s Central Committee and its uppermost Politburo. He stuffed the NKVD headquarter with the most effective and ruthless secret police personnel of the “North-Caucasian” clan of Yefim Yevdokimov with whom Yezhov allied. Yevdokimov’s close associate Mikhail Frinovsky, a highly capable commander of the special military operations, was promoted to the NKVD’s first vice-commissar. He orchestrated the most devastating mass operations and presided over the slaughtering of the Bolshevik elite.
The NKVD step by step obtained independence from the party-state, first devastating its regional and departmental branches, and then neglecting the control of the Politburo. The initial Yezhov’s presentation to deploy the NKVD against the hostile power groups and their social base on behalf of the new “socialist” classes was forgotten. The NKVD was evolving similarly to the evolution of other “classless” or “above-classes” totalitarian political regimes that emerged in Europe in the 1930s; Italian Fascism and German Nazism are the most notorious of them. The xenophobic “national operations,” launched by Yezhov against the Volga Germans, Poles, Far East Koreans and other ethnic minorities of the USSR, mirrored the Nazi and Fascist practices. The Yezhov’s NKVD’s main difference from the Nazi and Fascist regimes consisted of its lack of indisputable political hegemony, and the logic of the NKVD’s ascendance pushed Yezhov to offensive to grab it.
His offensive had two directions. First, he moved to destroy the group of the new classes’ leaders, – Zhdanov, Khrushchëv, Beria, and Baghirov. The NKVD launched arrests among their retinues. Beria’s crew that just descended on Ukraine to grab its governance and change its political top, blessed by Stalin, Sergey Kudryavtsev and Mikhail Bondarenko, was annihilated. Beria’s and Bagirov’s people in Azerbaijan whereinto Yezhov inserted the NKVD’s enforcer, Osvald Nodev, were ravaged. Yezhov looked for people who could report on Beria and Baghirov under NKVD torture questioning, he was preparing to arrest and finish Beria and Baghirov. The NKVD hunted around Zhdanov and Khrushchëv with the same intentions too. Second, almost simultaneously, Yezhov charged to weaken the Politburo by removing Stalin’s prime comrades and shaking Stalin’s holy revolutionary image. The NKVD opened cases against Molotov’s wife and Kaganovich’s brother; Kalinin was accused of giving out his underground mates to the Tsarist secret police in the pre-Revolution time. And soon Stalin found out that the NKVD investigated a suspicion that he was the Tsarist secret police’s informant. It was the ominous precipice.
At the very beginning of 1938, the group of the leaders of the new “socialist” classes, – Zhdanov, Beria, Khruschëv, Baghirov, – launched the preparations for the coup to overthrow the NKVD’s dominance and beat down Yezhov. They allied with the leaders of the order-officialdom bureaucracy and get the support of Stalin who allured to the cause Malenkov, the ambitious Yezhov’s pupil who was able to blow up Yezhov’s might from inside the party apparatus. The conspirators knotted their alliance at the First Session of the USSR’s Supreme Soviet in the middle of January 1938. They focused their efforts not on Yezhov, impregnable with all his titles and press reputation, but on the NKVD. Beria was assigned to infiltrate it, substitute Frinovsky, subtly change key Yezhov’s people and took over the authority over the secret police. Beria built up for the task a small but seasoned team consisting of Merkulov, Goglidze, Kobulov brothers, Gulst, Milshtein, Gvishiani and some others. They all were clever and ruthless and doomed in case of Beria’s downfall.
Yezhov’s overthrowal was a masterpiece of Beria’s special operation. It was launched despite Yezhov’s tremendous odds in the power, people, resources and publicity. Beria masterfully capitalized on a few strong entries that he enjoyed. Stalin’s stubborn defence of him was the main factor in his survival in the months of the coup’s maturing. Stalin refused to authorize Beria’s arrest on the base of the old well-known facts of Beria’s being a double agent in Baku in 1919-1920 and his alleged reporting to British intelligence. Stalin asked Yezhov for new deadly facts, and the NKVD was rather slow producing them. Second, Beria himself had much more abundant experience of the clandestine war than Yezhov, an organizational and ideological bureaucrat, although extremely gifted. Third, Beria had a team that was much better trained than the NKVD’s freshers who became Yezhov’s operatives after he decimated the old stuff of the secret police.
And finally, Beria had a couple of assets in Yezhov’s closest circle, – shaky and ill-controllable, – but the assets anyway which Yezhov lacked around Beria. They were notorious Frinovsky and Yezhov’s second wife, a journalist and socialite Yevgenia-Sulamif Hayutina-Feygenberg. Frinovsky once was Beria’s subordinate in Azerbaijan and Beria saved him in an episode of the clan fight inside the OGPU. Hayutina was the editor of the Soviet glamorous propaganda magazine, The USSR in construction. She devoted its fascinating issues to Transcaucasia, Georgia and Beria. Meanwhile, she was followed into Moscow’s promiscuity society of writers, diplomats and top officials into which she dangerously entangled herself making her career. Both Frinovsky and Hayutina couldn’t have been commanded to act against Yezhov directly but both of them could have been manipulated.
One of the coup’s deceptions was to convince Yezhov that Stalin planned to change him to Khrushchëv as the USSR’s Internal Affairs commissar and therefore to distract Yezhov to Khrushchëv as his alleged main enemy and weaken his assault on Beria. Playing in pair with Stalin’s support Beria and Khrushchëv managed to trick Yezhov right at the moment when Beria prepared the strike. Just before the decisive Politburo meeting on 21 August 1938, Yezhov was imbalanced when the intimate details of his wife’s affair with the prominent Soviet writer, Mikhail Sholokhov, the Nobel-prized author of the novel Quiet Flows the Don, were stripped together with the evidence of her sexual relations with a set of renegades who had been sentenced as Leon Trotsky’s and foreign intelligence’ covert agents.
At the Politburo’s meeting on 21 August 1938, Yezhov prepared the files to gain Beria’s and Khrishchëv’s arrest but Stalin reverted the discussion. He artfully counterposed Molotov against Yezhov, and attacked the NKVD’s Bolshevik discipline with the Malenkov-authored paper on the NKVD’ neglecting the decisions of the party. Stalin overwhelmed Yezhov and insisted on the change of Frinovsky as the Internal Affairs commissar’s first deputy and chief of the secret police by Beria. Yezhov could not challenge Stalin immediately because Frinovsky, his enforcer, just left for the inspection voyage to the Soviet Far East. Yezhov was assured that Beria would come to the NKVD as the secret police expert instead of the military commander Frinovsky to improve its efficiency and image. Yezhov did not believe Stalin and the Politburo but had to accept their proposal and accommodate Beria as the NKVD’s second top figure with special functions and rights.
Soon Beria managed to promote his people to the key NKVD offices of the secret police, Merkulov; operations, Bogdan Kobulov; investigation, Milshtein; foreign intelligence, Dekanozov; safeguard of the party’s leaders, Gulst. In a fast and crushing manner, they established Beria’s hegemony over the NKVD’s affairs. Beria also launched his people to the NKVD’s main territorial offices, – Goglidze to Leningrad, Gvishiani to the Far East, Amayak Kobulov to Ukraine, Sadzhaya to Uzbekistan, Borshchev to Turkmenistan, Tsanava to Belarus. The four latter secured the most dangerous national territories. Beria’s accomplices collected plenty of evidence of Yezhov’s and his top associates’ involvement in the conspiratorial activity against the Politburo, their connections with Leon Trotsky and other condemned “enemies of the people,” their corruption, voluntary prosecution and moral decay. It was the end of Yezhov and his thugs, including Yefim Yevdokimov and Frinovsky, and the shutdown of the Great Terror. In a couple of months, Beria, Andreyev and Malenkov together with the Baku-trained prosecutor Vyshinsky developed and implemented the legislation and practical manuals that cut short the NKVD’s capability to generate accusations and make arrests.
At the same time Stalin and Politburo, where Zhdanov became prominent, launched the party-state rearrangement that fixed the results of the chaotic promotion during the Great Terror. Most of the regional and departmental offices were granted to the young executives of the new generation, representatives of the new “socialist” classes and appointees of the Bolshevik order-officialdom. At the moment, both entities allied against Yezhov’s totalitarian fascist NKVD, however, their social bases and their political interests were fundamentally different in the long run. They became the political contenders on the surface of the social rivalry between the new “socialist” classes and the integrated “anti-Soviet” counter-socialist class. The contest between the Bolshevik group, that was bound to the new “socialist” classes, and the hierarchy of the party-state’s order-officialdom became the pattern of the USSR’s politics. The struggle between the new “socialist” classes and the “anti-Soviet” class became the fundamental antagonism of Soviet socialism.
Beria and socialism
The biographies of Beria, numerous and diverse as they are, are packed with “socialism”, as well as many other books on Soviet history, and rare of them define it. The life of Beria, similar to the lives of other leading figures of the USSR but in an especially precise way, outlines the fundamental arrangement of socialism as humankind’s particular form of organization. The life of Beria reveals the “socialist” classes, the backbone of the socialist society, and their social Nemesis, the “anti-Soviet” counter-socialist class, the target of Beria’s aggression. The advance stands for the former and suppression of the latter composed Beria’s political activity and determined his successes and failures. Beria’s life demonstrates the sails, winds, currents and shoals of the politics in the USSR’s socialist society. It was idealistic, doctrinal, and run by the Bolshevik party’s factions or dictatorial ambitions only secondary to being dominated by the class struggle.
The now-a-day scholars love to present Soviet socialism as a regime of the repeating swing from the ideologically motivated and power-obsessed tyranny of terror to the survivalist liberal rationality. However, they forget that every regime does not exist on its own and by its self-imposed needs. Each regime is a political form, and politics is the social groups’ actions to seize and keep up the power. Similar to any class society, the social confrontation rifted Soviet socialism. Beria, – smart, violent, self-minded as he was, – looks like the inborn captain of the social confrontation. He was one of few Soviet executives who were capable to exploit the nuclear energy of the social confrontation in favour of the classes to which they committed themselves and for their power-ascendance.
The composition of the book
The current study is devoted to the first twenty years of Beria’s political biography, 1919 – 1939 with plenty of entrée on his early age. It consists of three parts, – 1. “The ChK’s Air,” up to the end of 1924; 2. “The Horrible Infamy,” 1925 – the middle of 1933; “We Who Storm the Sky,” the middle of 1933 – 1939. All the parts’ titles are references to Beria of the prominent actors of the epoch. They took, respectively, 25%, 30% and 45% of the study. Beria’s biography is the chronologically linear one, it avoids the hypothetic deliberations on this or that property of Beria’s nature. Every of the current study’s parts consists of several chronologically consecutive chapters on major topics of Beria’s life. They are interconnected with the social and political history of the USSR, the history of the Bolshevik party, the Soviet secret police, collective biographies of Beria’s associates, and research on ideas that pierced his life.
The study has around 2, 000 references arranged as the end-notes to around 600 primarily archival and secondary historiographical sources and around 300 links to the photographic materials published on the open-access Internet, either personal photos or document scans. Together with as many as 300 links to open-access items of the literature the study’s bibliography allows to cross-verify the facts and track the conclusions of the current author independently. The book is a study on Beria, at the same time, it presents the organized bibliographical pool of Beria-related archives, literature and memoirs on the USSR. The index of persons to follow them over the book and the list of the intricate Soviet abbreviations assist in reading.
Thanks for your kind attention. V. Shirogorov
Vladimir Shirogorov 